Mind posting your build once you're satisfied with it, Dave? I might be building a music server for someone who isn't computer literate and have been considering building a cheaper variant of Computer Audiophile's pocket server. Due to too many years building gaming PCs, I'm having to repeatedly remind myself that I don't need to shove in a pair of GeForce cards in SLI to play flacs through Foobar.

Any thoughts on the Auraliti PK90, btw? I figure the MSRP ($749) is at least twice the BOM, but I read a few favorable comments so I'm curious, if only on an academic level.

Chances are I'll spend a few nights on silent PC review and hash something out under $800. I'm kind of annoyed that Win7 OEM will run $100-130 of the cost, but I'm not going to go the Hackintosh route for this one. Foobar Media Library is just too good If only they'd start selling Anedios again...

Sure, I'd be happy to. Right now it's looking like this:

Case: Lian Li PC-A04 ($100), chosen for decent ventilation that can be dust filtered, and light weight. Thin aluminum is a normally problematic with silent PCs, but since this will be fanless, vibration shouldn't be an issue. The drive cage and all fans will be removed. The Fractal Arc Mini has even better ventilation which is good for passive cooling, but it weighs twice as much.

Motherboard: Asus E35M1-M Pro ($120). This is a passively cooled Micro ATX board running AMD's E-350 processor. The E-350 is a better performer than the Intel Atom. I chose Micro ATX rather than Mini ITX for future proofing reasons. The board has a PCI-e slot and two PCI slots, and you can't get all of those together on a Mini ITX board. It also supports a full 8GB of ram.

Hard drive: 1TB Samsung EcoGreen ($140), which will be inside the Smart Drive Neo enclosure ($75), mounted in one of the CD drive bays.

RAM: 8GB of G.skill DDR3 ($45). Tons of ram is important for large playlists or high-res files in JPlay.

Power supply: For this, I may actually go with the Seasonic X-560 ($120), rather than a completely passive supply. The Seasonic is "semi-passive", and under light load conditions, the fan stays off. The E-350 never draws more than 50W, so the fan should never come on. If things start to get too hot though, the fan is there as a backup, so there's no risk of dangerously high temperatures which is a possibility with no fan at all. The Seasonic's iron grip on voltage and ripple are also a plus. You just don't get results like that with a power brick.

The total cost will be around $600, plus the $300 SoTM card, and a copy of Windows 7 64 and JPlay.

The Auraliti is really not a bad value, but the issue is powering it, and storing your music. A Hynes 12V supply for it and a high quality silent hdd enclosure like the HFX box would run you over a thousand dollars, more than the cost of my entire DIY system. You could use the brick supply and a NAS in a different room (assuming you''ve already got ethernet wired for that) but I think my ~10lb. all in one box is more practical.

Do you really need JPlay to offload the music data to RAM? Foobar can do that too as far as I know although the setting is hidden in the Advanced options.

JRiver also does memory playback. The main reason I want to build this dedicated music player is to try JPlay's hibernation mode, which Foobar and JRiver don't do. It basically shuts down the entire OS other than itself. System disk usage is reduced to zero. You can actually physically disconnect the hard drive, and JPlay will happily keep on playing all the songs that are in memory. JRiver or Foobar might be playing the files from RAM, but Windows could still be doing various hdd reads and writes in the background. With hibernation mode, that doesn't happen. Hence the need for a dedicated music PC - in hibernation mode it can't do anything else.

Do you really need JPlay to offload the music data to RAM? Foobar can do that too as far as I know although the setting is hidden in the Advanced options.

Theoretically you are right K3cT, but my from my experimentations I concluded that jplay's hibernation mode has the highest quality playback on Windows machines with dedicated USB/SPDIF converters. The difference to "fidelized" and "maxxxed" foobar2000 is not night-and-day, but it is audible in my system. Still, because of extremely limited interface and high price (my opinion) I still use foobar2000 on my work laptop.

But there are other alternatives... IMO, everybody who is into HQ music playback from computer source should at least try Openelec's implementation of XBMC server. It is Linux, but it's installation and configuration is quick and elegant, you do not see Linux's command line at all and if you do not want to touch your machine's configuration you can try it from USB stick. It will run fine also on your obsolete XP machine, audiophilleo is natively supported (no drivers required), you can control it over your tablet or mobile phone (with album art display and other candies), and most importantly - it plays music on jplay quality level. It is also free.

But there are other alternatives... IMO, everybody who is into HQ music playback from computer source should at least try Openelec's implementation of XBMC server. It is Linux, but it's installation and configuration is quick and elegant, you do not see Linux's command line at all and if you do not want to touch your machine's configuration you can try it from USB stick. It will run fine also on your obsolete XP machine, audiophilleo is natively supported (no drivers required), you can control it over your tablet or mobile phone (with album art display and other candies), and most importantly - it plays music on jplay quality level. It is also free.

Interesting, I'll have to look into that. It does seem like current 64-bit support is limited to Intel, the generic and Fusion builds appear to be 32-bit only. How does file management work on the actual PC, rather than with a phone? Is it all ID3 tag based?

Hmmm... did not paid attention to file management part - there are some file/directory related functions and plugins that can fetch artist and album info, lyrics and art, but since I prepare my music library with mp3tag/foobar2000 I have never used those functions on non properly named or tagged files.

As for using phone/tablet as remote - you choose between various XBMC remote applications. ATM I use official XBMC remote which has two music related modes: music mode that allows you browsing albums/artists/genres/compilations/filesystem and now playing mode where you see/alter currently queued/played songs. There is also general "remote control" mode in which you use your phone instead of keyboard/mouse to navigate/control main openelec interface on monitor/TV.

...and yes, browsing is tag based... but not just ID3 tag since XBMC can read and play almost any media format you throw at it.

Since it really does not take much time - I recommend tryout from bootable stick and pluging external disk with some music to get a look&feel of it all.

Sorry for OT. Just wanted to share my enthusiasm for something I consider very promising.

I really prefer how you can setup a hierarchical directory structure for your music library under Foobar, rather than dealing with the ID3 tag mess. This is probably more of a concern to folks with large collections, though.

I really prefer how you can setup a hierarchical directory structure for your music library under Foobar, rather than dealing with the ID3 tag mess. This is probably more of a concern to folks with large collections, though.

That's the way I do it, good old Windows folders. I personally can't stand ID3 tags, I always end up with duplicates, unknown artists, upper and lower case showing up as two different genres, etc.

You can route JPlay through a front-end/music manager like JRiver and MP3Toys (#8: http://jplay.eu/faq/)

You might be able to do the same with Stealth.

I tried Fidelizer out. It did something subtle but I didn't really like the change, and setting #2 (Audiophile) on my high-end i7-950 system (12GB DDR3, Win7 64bit Pro OS kept on its own clean partition) really choked overall performance.